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Notes and Comment

by E. B. White

The moon, it turns out, is a great place for men. One-sixth gravity must be a lot of fun, and when Armstrong and Aldrin went into their bouncy little dance, like two happy children, it was a moment not only of triumph but of gaiety. The moon, on the other hand, is a poor place for flags. Ours looked stiff and awkward, trying to float on the breeze that does not blow. (There must be a lesson here somewhere.) It is traditional, of course, for explorers to plant the flag, but it struck us, as we watched with awe and admiration and pride, that our two fellows were universal men, not national men, and should have been equipped accordingly. Like every great river and every great sea, the moon belongs to none and belongs to all. It still holds the key to madness, still controls the tides that lap on shores everywhere, still guards the lovers who kiss in every land under no banner but the sky. What a pity that in our moment of triumph we did not forswear the familiar Iwo Jima scene and plant instead a device acceptable to all: a limp white handkerchief, perhaps, symbol of the common cold, which, like the moon, affects us all, unites us all.

The Moon Hours

(The following pieces were written by various reporters.)

By 10 P.M. Sunday, twelve hundred people had gathered at the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Fiftieth Street, between Radio City Music Hall and the Time-Life Plaza. Rain had been falling since 7:30, and umbrellas shifted from side to side and poke up above heads, obscuring some people’s view of the thing everyone was trying to watch—a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot screen, on which NBC’s coverage of the moon landing was being shown in color. A large sign read “Life and nasa Present Apollo: Man to the Moon,” and huge photographs of the three Apollo astronauts stood in windows of the Time & Life Building. To the north of the television screen, a full-scale model of the lunar module was shielded from the rain by a plastic canopy, and other equipment had been given protective covers. The intersection was brightly lighted—two searchlights played on nearby buildings—and at this hour the area was extremely noisy. The noise was a constant, high-level mixture of automobile engines, horns, police whistles (twenty policemen were patrolling the area), the shouts of benders (they moved through the crowd selling pennants, souvenir buttons, pretzels, and ice cream), the voices and beeps from the TV audio system, and the chatter of the people crowded on the sidewalks behind police barricades. But as the time for the astronauts’ exit from the LM drew near, the crowd began to grow quiet. Anticipation was obvious in people’s faces, and the talk became a sort of nervous undertone. At ten-fifteen, a newcomer—a young man carrying a pack on his back—approached a man in a blue jacket and said, “I presume they’ve got to the moon.”

“You don’t know?” the man in blue asked. “Where have you been all day.”

“Just flown in. English,” said the young man,

“Well, they’re about ready to step out any second now,” the man in blue said.

The young man said, “Stone me! They must be way ahead of schedule. Oh, great! This is fantastic!”

At 10:54, when the first shot of the LM—the lower part—appeared on the screen, in black-and-white, a cheer went up. When Neil Armstrong’s foot was seen to touch the lunar surface, another cheer went up. When he stood with both feet on the moon, the people cheered and applauded a third time. Meanwhile, cars continued to roll by and the police moved incessantly in their attempt to keep the crowd behind the sidewalk barricades.

At 12:33 a.m. Monday, a No. 6 bus, without passengers, rolled silently down Seventh Avenue. A good number of people were walking west on Fiftieth Street—away from the Time-Life Plaza—and by this time only about three hundred people were left watching the big screen. The screen still showed the LM, whose legs looked bright in the sunlight. The rain, which had stopped for a while, had begun again, and people stood beneath umbrellas or improvised shelters of paper or plastic. At 12:41, a voice from Mission Control said, “This is Houston. You’ve got about ten minutes left now prior to commencing your E.V.A. termination activities. Over.” A young couple turned to each other and kissed. Working among the people, a man in coveralls began to sweep the plaza with a broom.

In the Eighteenth Precinct, on Fifty-fourth Street west of Eighth Avenue, two patrolmen brought in a young man and a young woman in handcuffs. The couple were booked on suspicion of having mugged a man on West Forty-fourth Street at about eleven o’clock—or at just about the time Armstrong was setting foot on the moon. Both suspects looked frightened and tired. Four police officers sat or stood in the main room. In an adjoining office, nine policemen—some in uniform and some in civilian clothes—sat relaxed in front of a television set that showed the lunar module. One man sat back with his feet on a desk, and others lounged on chairs or desks, watching the screen. They talked little, but from time to time someone spoke or laughed, and one young officer made a joke about having seen the whole thing before on “The Late Show.”

Inside the Chess & Checker Club of New York, which is upstairs at 212 West Forty-second Street, eighteen men sat at small tables over game boards in a silence that was broken only occasionally, by desultory remarks. The Times Square Bowling Lanes, upstairs at 1482 Broadway, were similarly devoted to recreation—twenty-five people were bowling—but four people sat in the establishment’s bar watching a television set, from which an announcer’s voice was saying, “Heart rates of the crewmen are averaging between ninety and one hundred. The flight surgeon reports they’re right on the predicted number of the B.T.U. units expended. . . .And he thinks they’re in great shape.”

To the customers in the Lincoln Bar, at the corner of Lenox Avenue and 135th Street, in Harlem, man’s first step onto the face of the moon was greeted more with a whimper than a bang. Scarcely anyone was looking or listening when Armstrong placed his foot on the moon. A jukebox, in a dark corner, was blaring “What the World Needs Now,” by the Sweet Inspirations, and a man with his back to the television set and a highball in his hand was telling a group of his friends about a girl he had just treated to a huge Chinese dinner who had declared on their way out of the restaurant that she now wanted a barbecue supper. “Man, I had to unload her,” he said. “I didn’t have enough left to put gas in my car.” One of the customer reached out, touched him, and said, “Hey, buddy, they walking on the moon.” The man with the highball put down his drink and walked out of the bar.

When Colonel Edwin Aldrin climbed down to join Armstrong, the conversations along the bar were louder than the conversation between moon and earth coming from the television set, and the jukebox in the corner had shifted to “I’m Going to Chicago, Sorry I can’t Take You.” The bartender—a short, amiable white man with a bald head and a clip-on bow tie, who took care of one end of the bar while a black barmaid took care of the other—went and turned off the jukebox.

“I do,” the bartender said. “And there’s a few other people here that do, too.”

“Damn!” the same voice said. “I hope those Whiteys never come back. They might just decide to stay there, too.”

“Nah,” a female voice said. “You can be sure the white man don’t want to live up there. It’s got no gold, it’s got no silver, it’s got no oil. And ain’t that what Whitey wants? He don’t want no part of all that rock up there.”

At this point, the man whose girl had demanded the barbecue came back and started telling another group the story.

“Be quiet,” the barmaid, a buxom, masterful-looking woman, said. “You full of nothin’ but Seagram’s gin. I want to see the men walking on the moon.”

“Hush with your moon,” he replied. “You believe any of that wild stuff?”

“You don’t really believe they walking on the moon?” the barmaid said. “I can see you ain’t ready for the moon yet. You still in another age, with the cotton-pickin’ machine. Or maybe you just in another orbit, with your Seagram’s.”

“Hell!” he said. “Where you at?”

“I’m a moon maid, baby.”

At the headquarters of the National Broadcasting Company, in Rockefeller Center, the Central Control Room, from which NBC coverage of the lunar landing was governed, was hot and stuffy, being packed with people in shirtsleeves. The controllers worked at two tiers of equipment-laden consoles, facing a wall covered with a formidable array of monitors that bore such legends as “houston,” “houston pool,” “videograph,” “camera 1,” “camera 2,” and “camera 6.” The front, and lower, tier of consoles was occupied by technicians, and in the center of it sat the director—Tony Messuri, a bald man wearing a headset and a pink shirt. To right and left of this tier were small rooms that were also packed with technicians. Executives of the NBC News Division occupied the second tier in Central Control, and the center of this tier was occupied by the executive producer of the NBC Space Unite—James Kitchell, a bushy-haired, young-looking man wearing a short-sleeved black shirt. Kitchell, too, had a headset on, and directly in front of him, within a few inches of his right hand, there was a box equipped with a row of spring-loaded switches. These switches gave Kitchell immediate access to the NBC studios—to a so-called Huntley-Brinkley Deck, which was mezzanine arrangement a few doors away from Central Control, and in which at the moment David Brinkley and Frank McGee were occupying the anchor desk, and also to Studio 8-H, a very large area that was originally designed for broadcasting performances by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony. Just then Studio 8-H had no traces of the concert hall about it. On one wall, about a raised platform, there was a twelve-foot-wide blowup of a photographic mosaic showing at least the major craters of Apollo 11’s Landing Site 2, the target area being marked off with a long elliptical line. Along the wall to the right, there was a three-dimensional model of the moon, about six feet across, set against a blue-white-and-gray backdrop presumably representing the Milky Way, and, beside this, a twenty-foot-long map of the central portion of the moon’s equatorial region, showing the flight path taken by the LM and its approximate position on the lunar surface. A third section of Studio 8-H contained a twenty-two-foot-high mockup—the actual size—of the LM. It had detailed representations of the cabin and instrument facilities, of the shiny Mylar insulation covering of the descent stage, and of the porch, the exit ladder, the foot pads, and the equipment-stowage area. Then, there were full-scale models of the command module and of the combined command and service modules. But Kitchell’s spring-loaded switches gave him access to a great deal more than this. It was less than twenty years ago that NBC was able to boast of having accomplished the feat of showing simultaneously, in split-screen images, the East and West Coasts of the United States. Now Kitchell was able to switch in instantaneously—through commercial-satellite communication—images of NBC correspondents and people they had access to in London, Cologne, and Tokyo. And already during the Apollo 11 mission he had been able to relay television shots of the earth itself made from space, and of portions of the moon as the command module orbited it.

Now, a few seconds after the voice of Frank McGee said, on the air, “Neil Armstrong’s on his stomach, feet first, coming out,” Messuri shouted to a technician responsible for the superimposition of titles on the screen, “Set me up ‘First Live Pictures from the Moon,’ baby!”

“Go to Houston!” Kitchell said loudly.

“And take it!” Messuri cried.

“Here it comes!” Kitchell shouted.

On the monitor marked “program” there appeared a ghostly, unclear, yet unmistakable black-and-white image of the lower portion of a heavily suited astronaut descending the LM ladder. The control room was filled with cheers and clapping.

“The foot!” Messuri cried.

Armstrong’s foot descended.

“Put ‘First Step on the Moon,’ ” Kitchell ordered, and then he said, “Wait! He’s not on the moon yet. So far, he’s just on the foot pad.”

“The shin bone,” someone said, and there was some technician laughter.

Armstrong’s foot could now be seen raised as he tried mounting the lowest rung of the LM ladder, and then his voice could be heard: “I’m at the foot of the ladder. . . .The Surface appears to be very, very fine-grained. . . .It’s one small step. . . .”

“Take it! ‘First Step on the Moon.’ ”

Everything became very quiet in the control room as the ghostly figure, white on a white ground, against a dark sky, touched what seemed like white rigging. It all looked like an old, grained, scratchy movie showing some hooded, frost-shrouded early polar explorer standing by the bulwark of an icebound ship.

“O.K., now let’s get ready for Nixon’s talk with astronauts,” Kitchell said. “Better star setting up a split screen with the White House and the lunar shots.” After a pause, he added, looking at the shot on the air, “It’s unbelievable. Unbelievable!”

Armstrong’s figure could be seen moving about the lunar surface as he tested his walk. He began walking with long, loping steps.

“Look at that!” Kitchell said, enthralled. “Look at him! Galloping across the moon!”

“The White Night!” a technician said.

On one of the monitors, a shot of President Nixon appeared. He was not on the air, and obviously realized that he wasn’t He was gesturing toward someone out of range, holding out a hand and waggling it as though saying no. After a while, the technicians began to rearrange the image of the President so that it fitted into the upper left-hand corner of the screen; it was to be superimposed on pictures from the moon. While this was going on, Colonel Aldrin also descended from the LM, and then it became apparent, from the blurring and heaving, that Armstrong had taken the television camera from the equipment bay and was walking with it away from the LM. On one of the monitors, the image of the President, sitting at his desk, appeared in the corner of this heaving scene; he looked as though ocean waves were sweeping and swirling against him. Then the lunar camera was trained on the LM from about forty feet away, and Messuri began to complain that now the left-hand-corner picture of the President was impinging on the shot of the LM, which also stood to the left of the screen.

“I’m lousing up my moon picture,” Messuri said.

Eventually, Armstrong centered the LM in his camera, and Messuri arranged the shot of the President so that the split-screen image of him did not unduly cover the image of the LM.

Then the President made his telephone call to the astronauts, the interchange went off the air, and for a few moments, before the television lights in the White House were extinguished, Mr. Nixon could be seen on the monitor, disengaging, with the help of a technician, a microphone he had had about his neck.

As the lunar broadcast proceeded, Donald Meaney, a vice-president of the NBC News Division, who was sitting immediately to Kitchell’s right, left the control room for a few minutes, and then returned to remark, “One thing I think this is doing is to bring people together. The picture is going everywhere in the world by satellite. I hear they’re getting a great picture in Bucharest. And in Belgrade. And, you know, nobody has the inside track on seeing these pictures. The scientists in Houston, the President of the United States, all of us in this room, perhaps Serbian peasants—they’re all seeing the same fantastic live pictures at the same time. Nobody any better than anybody else, really. Maybe that holds something pretty good for all of us.”

In the ground-floor apartment of a brownstone in the East Nineties, at around eight-thirty, guests began to arrive for a moon-watching party that was being given by two young men just out of law school. The male guests, most of whom were young lawyers, like their hosts, were dressed informally but expensively, some in light-colored summer suits and some in richly colored shirts. The ties in the room were wide but not flowery. The women, who seemed a few years younger than the men, were also expensively dressed, many in silky, boldly patterned bell-bottom trouser suits. The arriving guests sat down on a sofa, on chairs, or on a mattress on the floor which had been brought in from a bedroom. The political temper of the group soon established itself as liberalism-taken-for-granted. Some of the young men had spent time in the last few years working for liberal political candidates. Although so recently out of law school, many of them had already acquired the self-assured, forceful handshakes of successful lawyers, and had already adopted the lawyerish mannerisms of fixing their listeners with a frank gaze and speaking to them in carefully measured tones. On the television screen, Walter Cronkite was waiting for the astronauts to finish checking their spacecraft in preparation for their walk on the moon’s surface. The people in the living room were a loosely connected collection of friends, and many of them were catching up on each other’s recent past. There was a hubbub of many conversations.

“I think I met you at a skating party.”

“If you have all your defense mechanisms up. . .”

“Shall we introduce them now or later?”

Conversation about the moon landing was restricted to jokes or brief comments. Many people seemed to want something to happen that was more exciting than what could really happen.

“It would be great if they found an animal,” one man said.

“We’ve seen everything in simulation. They might as well do it all in simulation,” a girl said.

Several people said they were not sure whether the CBS simulation of the LM landing being shown at that moment was real or not.

“Hey, those furry claws coming down the ladder!” someone said.

“No. Coming out of a crater,” said a girl.

The moment when CBS expected Armstrong to emerge from the LM arrived. When the exit was delayed for ten minutes while the astronauts continued to check their equipment, a hush finally fell over the group. After several minutes, a man said, “They’re having one more hand of poker.” Then the voices of the astronauts began to announce Armstrong’s emergence onto the porch at the top of the ladder. The hush continued. Suddenly, a telephone in the next room rang, and a young man went to answer it. When he returned, Walter Cronkite was saying, “Commander Armstrong is about to pull the ring that will give us our first live television coverage from the moon.” The telephone rang again, and someone said, “Let it ring,” but another man, after hesitating, went to answer it. The landscape of the moon appeared on the screen. At the top of the screen was the jet black of pace. In the middle was the brilliant streak of whiteness that was the lunar landscape. At the bottom was the blackness of the LM’s shadow. The ladder to the ground cut vertically across the screen. Armstrong’s foot appeared. The young man returned from answering the phone and announced, “There’s a girl up at the corner who can’t find the party.”

The group was riveted to the screen in silence during Armstrong’s descent to the ground, during his first steps and his first words, and during Colonel Aldrin’s descent. Then there was some more joking. “When we find the first moon men, we’ll have to decide which ones to support—the ones from the South or the ones from the North. We’ll have to send military advisers.” Conversations about other matters started again.

Aldrin, after taking a few steps, began to jump up and down on the moon. “Magnificent!” he said.

On the sofa, a couple began talking about a girl named Margie.

Suddenly, Armstrong emerged with amazing speed from the black shadow of the LM into the brilliant sunlight. There was a sigh from the group; then it fell silent again for a moment. As Armstrong set up the television camera to look back on the LM, conversation resumed.

“There’s something interesting a crater here!” Armstrong called out as he moved away from the LM.

A girl who was sitting on the floor began to tell about a friend of hers who had married a nun. “The nun was in the lecture course he was giving,” she said. “He had her out of her robes and married in two weeks, and a year later she had twins.”

On the screen, Aldrin was loping in a circle on the surface of the moon in front of the LM.

The girl looked up at the screen and cried out, “I just don’t believe it!”

“I’m used to it already,” a young man next to her said.

“When you get blasé about people going to the moon, you know you’ve changed,” she said.

On the second floor of the living quarters of Gracie Mansion, Mayor Lindsay, in a yellow sports shirt, gray slacks, and brown loaders, was watching CBS on a color-television set. On the Mayor’s knees was a three-page statement on the moon walk; he had been cutting it for the past half hour and appeared still dissatisfied with it. To his left, Jay Kriegel, a young assistant, sat on a chaise longue with his shoes off, looking intently at simulations of what was to come. Other staff members—most of them in their twenties—sprawled in chairs and on the floor. The only man wearing a suit and tie was a Democratic politician from Queens who had arrived earlier in the evening to offer the Mayor his support in the coming election. The room they were sitting in belonged to the Mayor’s daughter Anne, who was away at camp. Tacked to the door were signs: “snoopy lives here,” “no peddlers,” “entering twilight zone.” In the next room—the master bedroom—Mrs. Lindsay was also looking at a color set. Watching with her were another daughter, Kathy; a Columbia Law School student who is a friend of Kathy’s; a driver for the Mayor; two of the three policemen who are usually on duty outside Gracie Mansion; and a family friend. In intermittent attendance in both rooms was Detective Sergeant Pat Vecchio, a wiry, intense man who is in charge of protecting the Mayor.

In Anne Lindsay’s room, as the hatch of the LM was about to be opened, the Democratic politician was talking precinct strategy in Queens with Richard Aurelio, the Mayor’s campaign manager, while a young assistant to the Mayor lying on the floor proclaimed, “Procaccino just issued a statement pledging to make the moon safe for law and order.”

Two more assistants to the Mayor, Sid Davidoff and Barry Gottehrer, arrived, drenched. Because of the rain, the Mayor wondered aloud whether he ought to go, as he had planned, to the Moon-In, the city-sponsored celebration in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. Mrs. Lindsay, who had appeared at the door, shook her head. “With those men walking on the moon, they won’t be watching you,” she said to her husband, and she went away, grinning.

Jay Kriegel passed a notebook to the Mayor. “Here’s your schedule for Wednesday.”

Lindsay looked away from the television screen, studied the page, and grimaced. “That’s murder,” he said. “Just murder.”

The first pictures of Armstrong setting foot on the moon were about to come through. Conversation in the room stopped. The Mayor leaned forward, his statement slipping to the floor. “There’s a foot!” he said. “There’s a foot on the moon!” His eyes fixed on the screen, the Mayor shook his head. “Fantastic! God, this is dramatic!”

As it became clear that Armstrong and Aldrin were having no difficulties, the moon watchers at Gracie Mansion relaxed.

Picking up his statement from the floor, the Mayor read it again, and cut out another paragraph. Gottehrer and Davidoff were now convinced that he should go to the Moon-In. The Mayor agreed, but he kept delaying his departure. “Look at that shot of the horizon!” he said.

Finally, at a quarter to midnight, he rose and went into the master bedroom. He returned in a beige jacket, a white shirt, and a blue-figured tie. The Mayor and Mrs. Lindsay, with Davidoff, Gottehrer, Pat Vecchio, and the press secretary, Tom Morgan, squeezed into a black car in front of the Mansion.

As the car moved west, Vecchio, in the front seat, announced, “No matter what’s happening, I’m not going to forget about Columbus.”

“That guy doesn’t have his lamp lit,” Davidoff said. “Give him a ticket.”

“Come on,” the Mayor said. “He’s right.”

At the Sheep Meadow, Vecchio guided Lindsay to and from three television interviews. Just before the second one began, the Mayor, who seemed blinded by the bright lights, was approached by a slender woman. She shook his hand vigorously, saying, “Congratulations, Mr. Mayor!” He blinked, and blinked again. It was Mrs. Lindsay.

“Save your moon glow for November!” a woman shouted as the Mayor approached his car following a swift tour of the Meadow.

“Yeah, Mayor baby!” someone else roared, to the Mayor’s delight.

The Mayor leaned out of the car window and grabbed the hand of a policeman. “Thanks, Fred. You guys did a good job,” he said. “Turning to his wife as the car moved away, he remarked, “That’s a great cop. King of the towaways.”

Hours earlier, as the rain came down steadily and a premature darkness fell over the city, hundreds of people streamed through Central Park and converged on the center of the Sheep Meadow to join the Moon-In crowd that was already standing in a huge circle around three nine-by-twelve-foot television screens set up in a triangular formation and tuned to three different channels. The Meadow was filled with puddles and mud holes, and many of the younger spectators had shucked their shoes and were negotiating the slippery terrain in bare feet. Some people carried umbrellas, others pulled coats or jackets over their heads, and a good many seemed happy simply to give themselves up to the rain and the prospect of a soaking. In front of the CBS screen, five young men in beards shared a large green-red-and-yellow striped beach umbrella; next to them stood a couple huddled beneath a bed quilt; and nearby three girls who had contrived a makeshift tent out of an Army-surplus blanket and a pair of sanitation trash baskets were playing Scrabble. Overhead, three searchlight beams met, forming a soft halo of haze, through which the rain fell in silver sheets. Shortly before nine o’clock, Walter Cronkite announced that the hatch of the LM would be opened in half an hour, and the word was immediately carried over the Meadow on hundreds of lips. “The hatch,” people whispered. “The hatch is going to be opened. The hatch. . .” A few minutes later, the rain stopped and umbrellas were furled. The crowd around the television screens was so dense that movement was nearly impossible, and here and there, in a vast assemblage that filled the Meadow almost as far as the eye could see, small children, their eyes blinking with sleep and wonderment, were hoisted upon their fathers’ shoulders. The rain started to come down again, and hundreds of umbrellas were unfurled, only to be furled again as people in the rear protested that they couldn’t see the screens.

As the scheduled moment for the hatch opening approached, the crowd grew still, and every gaze appeared to be fixed on a television screen. Then came an announcement that the moon walk would be delayed for half an hour, and there was a sustained groan of disappointment. At a quarter to ten, Houston could be heard through a crackle of static calling to the command module, and a few minutes later the crowd, which had grown hushed again, burst into applause when the astronauts were informed by the voice of Mission Control, “You are go for cabin depressurization.” The rain stopped and started several times during the next half hour, and dozens of spectators, weary from standing and long since soaked, began to sit down in the wet grass and mud. When the hatch opened, and Armstrong’s booted foot could be seen groping for the rungs of the landing vehicle’s ladder, and the totally unreal words “live from the surface of the moon” appeared upon the screens, there was a gasp, as if everyone had taken a quick breath. There was a smattering of applause, and then dozens of flashbulbs began popping as cameramen took pictures of a vast sea of faces held perfectly still at the same upturned angle and frozen into identical expressions of rapture and awe.

For the next twenty minutes, the crowd feasted silently upon the spectacle unfolding before it, and when Aldrin came down the ladder to join Armstrong, there was a loud burst of applause, laughter, and cheering. After a short while, there was a surge away from the screens as people started moving about and stretching their cramped legs. Some of the spectators headed for a large refreshment tent that had been set up on the east side of the Meadow. Many of these people moved on to a nearby bandstand, where an orchestra had swung into a nineteen-thirties version of “Blue Moon.” When, at twelve minutes before midnight, President Nixon came on the television screens to talk with the astronauts, many people turned back toward the center of the Meadow to rejoin the hundreds who had stayed to watch Armstrong and Aldrin in their historic walk. After the President had finished, it was announced that Armstrong had been on the surface of the moon for fifty-nine minutes, and suddenly Aldrin could be seen floating gracefully over the lunar surface as he performed mobility exercises. The jazz band that had been blaring away in the background was replaced by a rock-and-roll ensemble, whose performance raised the decibel count in the Meadow even higher, and the spectators crowded closer to the television screens in order to hear the astronauts describe the lunar landscape and to watch them walk around scooping up samples of its rock.

At one o’clock, the voice of Mission Control told Aldrin to “head on up the ladder,” and announced that Armstrong had been on the surface of the moon slightly more than two hours. The rain was beating down steadily now, but only when the hatch of the landing vehicle was closed, eleven minutes later, did the last, diehard spectators turn away. Some hippies rushed by chanting “Free the moon!” Then people by the hundred began streaming toward Fifth Avenue. Behind them, like an unblinking eye, the NBC screen still showed a picture of the LM sitting at Tranquillity Base. The astronauts were safe inside and the moon walk was over, but almost everyone kept looking back over his shoulder through the downpour, as if to reassure himself that what he had seen with his eyes in the Sheep Meadow had really taken place upon the moon. ♦

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